Kaiser Permanente Donating CMT Database to Help Explain EMRs

Health plan provider Kaiser Permanente has donated its Convergent Medical
Terminology database to the International Healthcare Terminology Standards
Development Organization to allow doctors and patients to understand the
terminology in electronic medical records.
The technology will be distributed by the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services.

CMT is a core part of KP's HealthConnect EMR
platform, the world's largest EMR, according
to the company, which has more than 8.6 million users that include physicians,
nurses and pharmacists.

CMT will help professionals achieve meaningful
use of EMRs by fostering interoperability of health data standards with the
linked clinician- and patient-friendly terminology, according to KP.
"It is a very central part of interoperability and the capture of precise
clinical information that is foundational to all of meaningful use," John
Mattison, chief medical information officer and assistant medical director for
KP, told eWEEK.
The goal of CMT is for health care
professionals to be able to read all EMRs without having to manage complex and
incompatible terminology that may be conflicting or redundant, he said.
"Within a given use case, there is no reason to have lots of conflicting
standards," Mattison explained.

"CMT is one of those deeply complex
bodies of work that go unnoticed," said Phil Fasano, chief information
officer for KP, at a press conference at HHS
on Sept. 29. "The purpose of CMT is to
make the care-giving experience as seamless as possible."
Dr. David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health IT, called CMT
a "solution to a humanware problem, not just a software problem,"
with both clinicians and patients able to understand EMR
terminology.
CMT has three key components: a body of
medical terms linked to computer code, quality-assurance utilities and mapping
between terminologies sets, according to Mattison.
The National Library of Medicine will work on the mapping of terminologies,
and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will also provide support.
"One of the key challenges to achieving a coherent health record for
every U.S.
consumer is the need for consistent data across all systems and
institutions," said HHS Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius in a statement.
"This donation of the Convergent Medical Terminology from Kaiser
Permanente addresses that critical need by making it easier for health
professionals and patients to create standardized data in electronic health
records. It can help physicians provide better evidence-based care, while
directly supporting the administration's investment in bringing information
technology to health care," Sebelius added.
CMT will also allow health professionals
to map terms in EMRs to internationally accepted classifications and
vocabularies, such as SNOMED CT
(Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms).
Physicians will be able to view clinical terminology within EMRs, while
patients will view patient-friendly language, said Fasano.
"It provides the ability to display a term that's friendly to the
physicians and consumer and normalize it in techy talk where it's aggregated
into a comprehensive continuous health record," Mattison said. "They
can have one complete record that uses the same base of medical terms and
concepts represented in different ways for different users."
Doctors will be able to view medical terms such as "senile
cataract" and "morbid obesity," but patients would just view
"cataract" or "obesity" to avoid alarming them, Mattison
explained.
Still, Mattison noted that these examples are the exception to the rule.
He'd rather see doctors and patients viewing the same term in EMRs. "We
would like to see a convergence onto a single set of terminology, but one that
is linked to an existing terminology set," he said.
Editor's Note: This article has been corrected to clarify that Kaiser Permanente is not associated with the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Brian T. Horowitz is a freelance technology and health writer as well as a copy editor. Brian has worked on the tech beat since 1996 and covered health care IT and rugged mobile computing for eWEEK since 2010. He has contributed to more than 20 publications, including Computer Shopper, Fast Company, FOXNews.com, More, NYSE Magazine, Parents, ScientificAmerican.com, USA Weekend and Womansday.com, as well as other consumer and trade publications. Brian holds a B.A. from Hofstra University in New York.